Valentine dinner this year was a simple affair. We wanted to stay in because it was cold out, it was a Sunday, and I wasn’t feeling well. Besides, homemade meals just taste a little bit better than a plate from a fancy restaurant. There is that whole business of having to wash dishes afterwards but those can wait until the next day. We chose a simple menu of Bolognese sauce on angel hair pasta, French bread, and a Tarte Tatin (recipe to come later). I meant to make a spinach salad with a balsamic dressing too but I absolutely forgot all about it. It wasn’t really missed. Note that this recipe will make a ton of food. You will be having delicious leftovers for days, or you can feed about 5-6 people. This sauce is a labor of love because it takes a while for it to cook, approximately 2-3 hours.
Ingredients:
Olive oil
Mirepoix: diced onions, celery and carrots
5 cloves of garlic, diced
1 lb ground beef
1 lb ground pork or veal
3 lbs tomatoes, chopped, or two cans of whole tomatoes
1 ½ cup wine
1 ½ cup milk
Basil (preferably fresh)
Salt and pepper to taste
Parmesan cheese
2 packages of fresh pasta
In a large pot, heat up some olive oil on medium heat. Throw in the mirepoix and let it sweat for a few minutes. When the onions become translucent, throw in the garlic. Mix mix mix.
Dump all the meat into the pot, beef and pork. Some recipes call for ground veal so use that instead of the pork if you got it. We opted not to use it because veal is a little pricier, and I just feel bad eating it. It reminds me of that Simpsons episode when Lisa goes vegetarian. “Leeeesa, I thought you loooooved meeee.”
Anyway. Let the meat brown. There is a lot of meat so it will take a while but do not skip or rush over this part. It is important! Browned meat is good meat. Season with salt and pepper.
When the meat looks good and ready, shove in all the tomatoes you’ve got. Three pounds sounds like a lot but they disintegrate to almost nothing but juice by the time this is done, so don’t be shy. Canned is fine too, if you don’t feel like getting tomato juice all over your chopping board. Chopping up that much tomatoes can be a pain but to me cutting up veggies is a little cathartic, so go with what you feel like.
Pour in the wine. Take a little swig for yourself. Go ahead, I won’t tell anyone, you lush.
Pour in the milk too, but make sure it is warm first. Don’t go pouring in cold milk into a hot pot. It’ll curdle and get all gloopy and disgusting.
Bring it up to a boil, then lower the heat to a simmer. Leave it uncovered. Now the waiting game starts. You have to wait and let the sauce reduce. It is still worrisomely watery at this point but walk away and knit or something. Seriously. This will take a while.
Check on it a couple of times and stir it up a bit. Skim off the glistening layer of oil that comes to the surface but don’t go crazy. We’re not trying to diet here. Obviously.
Set your Delorean to 3 hours ahead and now we have a gorgeous sauce. Put in some salt and pepper. Our professor-chef tells us to keep adding salt and pepper to enhance the flavors; once it stops enhancing the flavors, stop adding stuff. I know that sounds like a bunch of nonsense but I promise it will start to make sense when you cook regularly. It means season a little at a time, then taste, then season some more if you need to. Don’t put in too much because in cooking, you can always add but it’s harder to subtract. Put some basil in there. Dried is fine but fresh is better. My fresh basil withered away, booo, so I had to use the dried stuff. Just another reminder to start on an herb garden.
We bought some fresh pasta for this occasion. You can find it refrigerated in your local grocery, usually near where the cheeses are. You can use the boxed stuff but if you’re going through all the trouble of making a really good sauce, you might as well spring for some fresh pasta too, right? They’re not all that expensive anyway, at about $2 a package. Plus they take 60 seconds to cook. For realz. You dump them into boiling water and by the time you sing ABCs three times, they’re ready to come back out. You have to sing it loud though. It’s in the cooking directions. At the top of your lungs is better.
Okay, are we hungry yet? Here you go. Serve with love. And French bread. And wine.
PS: I know that it’s been a long time since Valentines. I meant to post this sooner but a lot of stuff happened between now and then… including our engagement. I’ll try to be better about posting regularly now that that’s out of the way. 😉
So this is probably a bit of a late post but gimme a break… preparing all that food for our little Superbowl party was biting off way more than I could chew. But chew we did, and I gotta say I was pretty happy with most of the food.
I don’t have a whole lot of experience feeding a dozen or so people so I went hunting around on the internetz for some inspiration. There are a ton of amazing food bloggers out there and so it felt like I got a bit of help in planning out what to make.
Chopping for Vegetarian Gumbo. This recipe wasn’t really all that great… wasn’t too happy with it at all, so I’m not going to bother linking the site to you. If you do happen to search for it and it asks for vegetarian sausage, let me save you some grief right now and tell you that it does not exist. The guy at the meat counter will just give you a dirty look and banish you to the frozen foods aisle, where you will find other vegetarian “meat,” but definitely NOT sausage.
Can you tell where my shirt is from? Bonus cookie if you can.*
Seven Layer Dip… More like 5 layers really. I forgot to make the guacamole. D’oh. I also didn’t want to put shredded lettuce on it. I borrowed this recipe from a member of Allrecipes.com. Here it is.
Jalapeno poppers. These suckers were more labor-intensive than anticipated. Cut in half, seed (the seeds go flying EVERYWHERE), stuff with cream cheese then stick some bacon. Sounds simple but it took me close to an hour to prep. Guh. But it was a huge hit. Here’s the recipe, from one of my favorite food bloggers, Pioneer Woman. She takes beautiful pictures, makes amazing yet simple food and she has a great story (city girl turned ranch wife). Go check out her stuff. Be warned though, her website is picture-heavy so it is not friendly to slow internet connection.
Adobo-glazed wings. Now I probably broke a Superbowl Rule of some sort by not deep-frying these babies but I just did not want to deal with a vat of oil and my house smelling like a KFC. I had Boyfriend grill them instead and I gotta say I think that actually added a lot of wonderful flavor. So I’m not apologizin’ to nobody. For the glaze, I turned to another Filipino food blogger, Burnt Lumpia, a genuinely funny guy with some really incredible recipes. Here you go.
And finally, the piece de resistance. Brisket. Oh wow. This had so much flavor in it that it made my head swim. I pulled this from Smitten Kitchen, who has AH-mazing recipes. I have yet to be disappointed with anything on that site. Her recipe is a slow-cooker recipe but I just cooked mine in the oven for about 3 1/2 hours and it was perfect. Either way you go, you have got a real winner with this one. Here it is.
We had a few other munchies but these are the highlights. Unfortunately we forgot to take pictures of the desserts, all of which were prepared by my sister Nikki. Cupcakes, Oreo truffles, chocolate chip cookies… oh my! She totally saved my ass since I had no time at all to make dessert myself, and what is a big gathering without fattening sweets? She remains reigning Dessert Queen at our house. I’ll make sure to talk her into doing a guest post eventually.
Hope you guys had a fun Superbowl Sunday too! Unless the Cowboys are playing, I don’t really care who wins (come on Cowboys, stop breaking my heart). I do tend to root for the underdog, though, and during this Superbowl, it seemed like everyone who came over had the same idea. So congratulations Saints! Sounds like Mardi Gras is going to be a long affair this year!
A lot of my friends are big fans of Aqua Teen Hunger Force. I’ve seen a couple of episodes myself and sure, that shit’s funny. But honestly I can’t watch it because of Meatwad.
I know, he’s the cute and innocent one. But he’s an uncooked meatball. With hair. And a tooth. It gives me the heebie jeebies whenever I look at him.
Today’s recipe somewhat resembles Meatwad but I promise it is delicious and not at all off-putting. I saw this on one of Emeril’s shows, and though I turned the volume down to avoid a lot of the BAMs, I knew it was the answer to my longtime meatloaf quandary.
See, in general, I enjoy foods comprised of mashed meatstuffs: meatballs, burgers, sausage. So really I want to like meatloaf. The problem I’ve always had with it is that it dries out like a brick. Ketchup can save it… sometimes… but really most of the flavor gets all cooked out when the moisture is zapped out.
The fact that Emeril cooks his meatloaf in a pool of broth was something of a revelation to me, and I’ve been cooking it this way ever since. Plus it gives you enough juices for gravy! Seriously, win-win.
Ingredient:
3/4 pound ground beef
1/4 pound ground pork
1/2 yellow onion, finely minced
1/2 bell pepper, finely minced
3 cloves of garlic, finely minced
2 eggs
1/2 cup heavy cream
3/4 to 1 cup Panko (Japanese-style bread crumbs)
Salt and fresh ground black pepper
2 cups beef stock
2 tablespoons flour
2 tablespoons water
Directions:
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Spray a roasting pan with cooking spray.
In a mixing bowl, add beef, pork, onions, peppers, garlic, eggs, cream, and bread crumbs. Blend thoroughly. Season the mixture with salt and pepper.
Shape the mixture into a loaf and place on the prepared pan. I use the Alton Brown method: cover a loaf pan with Saran wrap and use that to shape the meatloaf. Invert it over your (bigger) pan and peel the Saran wrap off.
Pour the stock over the meatloaf and place in the oven. Bake for about 1 to 1 1/2 hours, basting occasionally. Mine only seem to need 1 hour in the oven but this depends on how thickly you shaped your meatloaf.
Remove the pan from the oven. Using a long spatula, remove the meatloaf from the pan. Place the roasting pan on the stove, over high heat. In a small bowl, whisk the flour with 2 tablespoons water. Whisk the slurry into the gravy. Bring the liquid to a boil and cook for few minutes, stirring constantly. Season the gravy with salt and pepper. Serve with a spoonful of gravy.
We ate ours with some of Boyfriend’s mashed potatoes, (which involves a lot of butter, heavy cream, a splash of beef broth, and a generous dash of garlic salt), some sauteed corn-from-a-can, carrots, and some ready-made dinner rolls. Mmm, comfort food.
So if I like mashed meats so much, would I cook meatloaf any other way? You know that I would do anything for love… of meat… but I won’t do that…
(Sorry, but you know I HAD TO)
Speaking of Meatloaf, Boyfriend and I have frequent shitty-movie watching parties and incidentally Mr. Loaf was in a movie we recently watched. Check out the review.
I’ll try to be better about posting regularly now that that’s out of the way. 😉